Thursday, December 2, 2010

That must be exhausting.

I haven't gone back to check, but I'm going to assume that a common thread I keep harping on is the inherent and necessary subjectivity of meaning. I figured out a couple of days ago, as I navigate my current existential obstacle course, that the philosophy of absurdism is a pretty acceptable way to answer the question of nihilism.

Nihilism itself seems to me to have some pretty heavy built-in problems. It's kind of like cannibalism -- anyone interested in talking about it probably hasn't done it, because it would come from such a primal and unshaped part of a human being that to discuss it in any terms is academic pretty much automatically. Nobody but a shallow troublemaker would ever subscribe to it as a way of life if they had a choice not to.

And if they did, there's the problem that it would be a choice. And active acceptance of the idea that there is no scale, and indeed no weight, to existence is self-oppositional enough to even the most abstrusely philosophical mind that a serious act of will would be required to pierce the veil and cross from the former world into the latter.

Absurdism, on the other hand, matches up so closely with the territory I've been marking out for myself, mirrors with such accuracy the Discordianism I've followed for years, aligns so comfortably with the foundational ideas that have propelled what artistic output I've been able to manage, that it's kind of embarrassing that I don't think I've ever directly encountered the official version before.

So perhaps now I can legitimately connect my worldview to a tradition pre-dating hippies. Unless the brute force of the Faux-Moralist Revolution drags me to Room 101 and convinces me that Camus was just blowing smoke.

Read Ionesco's "The New Tenant" - I think you'll love it. Also, one of my favourite plays of all times is his "Victims of Duty". I have a whole bunch of absurdist plays that I collected from many secondhand bookstores in the early nineties - if you come to TO you can peruse! ;)

Gal-lery

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My editing mode never ends, so anything written here may be subtly altered from time to time.A conscientious host would hoist a flag when and wherever it occurred, but I'm not one of those.It's not that I don't love you, but I just don't care about that kind of accuracy, so you'll have to live with it.